Bluntly put: without hydrocarbons you are naked, hungry, and freezing. Full stop. The so-called alternatives are nowhere near good enough to sustain a planet of eight billion people. Not even close.
In 1700, just before the Industrial Revolution began to bite, the world population stood at a little over half a billion. Sixteen times fewer humans than today. Let’s be charitable. Let’s assume smarter use of soil, better agronomy, and some non-oil technologies and push that carrying capacity to one billion. Then let’s be absurdly generous and double it again—because miracles can happen, right?
That still leaves Earth’s non-hydrocarbon carrying capacity at roughly two billion people. And that estimate is wildly optimistic.
So what about the other six billion?
Are they to be culled? Because if we deliberately eliminate the means that sustain eight billion humans, there will not be many options left. This is the most brutal arithmetic imaginable, but arithmetic does not care about feelings. It only counts.
This is the question the alarmists must answer. Not with slogans. Not with morality plays. With specifics. How do you deal with the billions who can no longer be clothed, fed, heated, transported, or medically supported?
I am not an alarmist. I want all humans to live as well and as safely as possible. Every single one. Which conveniently means I do not have to make these choices. I made my bed and I lie in it.
But the alarmists? Any alarmist unwilling to provide a straight answer to this question—what happens to the people who become surplus when hydrocarbons are removed—should be excluded from the debate entirely. Because once you refuse to engage with consequences, you are no longer arguing policy. You are indulging in wishful thinking.
And wishful thinking has been responsible for some of the darkest chapters in our history books.
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2026/02/04/crudely_put_oil_is_everywhere_1162686.html